A Semantic Approach to Build Personalized Interfaces in the Cultural Heritage Domain

In this paper we present a system we have built to disseminate cultural heritage distributed across multiple museums. Our system addresses the requirements of two categories of users: the end users that need to access information according to their interests and interaction preferences, and the domain experts and museum curators that need to develop thematic tours providing end users with a better understanding of the single artefact or collection. In our approach we make use of a semantic representation of the given heritage domain in order to build multiple visual interfaces, called "Virtual Wings" (VWs ). Such interfaces allow users to navigate through data available from digital archives and thematic tours and to create their own personalized virtual visits. An interactive application integrating personalized digital guides (using PDAs) and 360 panoramic images is the example of VW presented.